VR Films Are Going to Be All Over Sundance in 2015

After bringing a handful of Oculus Rift installations to Sundance in 2014, the festival’s New Frontier program, which focuses on innovation in filmmaking, is doubling down and bringing in a much larger slate of virtual reality experiences for 2015. Of the 13 installations in the program, nine feature VR and one of the remaining four—a videogame-esque piece about the Iranian Revolution in 1979—could have a virtual version one day. It’s a slate, senior programmer Shari Frilot says, that shows VR is “a point of conversation that’s going to be really relevant to festival audiences and filmmakers.”

“I’ve never really seen anything like this where a new technology is so muscularly poised to hit the market,” says Frilot, who has curated the New Frontier program for nine years. “This is the year that we’re really going to get wired into this hardware in a major way. It really has the potential to shift the [filmmaking] terrain quite a bit in a very significant and deep way.”